Research News

UW-Madison’s Nicholas Hillman is the lead author of a monograph that was recently published in the ASHE Higher Education Report. This study is titled, “Public Policy and Higher Education: Strategies for Framing a Research Agenda.” Hillman says this paper was written for graduate students and junior faculty members, like the co-authors, who are examining ways to better frame and conduct higher education research so that it will be more relevant to policymakers.

UW-Madison’s Julie Mead will be delivering a presentation in Wausau on Thursday, Feb. 26, that will examine some of the controversy surrounding proposed legislation related to vouchers and school choice in Wisconsin. The event is being sponsored by the Wisconsin institute for Public Policy and Service, and it runs from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at the UW Center for Civic Engagement, 625 Stewart Ave., in Wausau.

UW-Madison’s Maisha T. Winn earlier this month helped deliver a presentation about an article that she co-authored for the journal Race and Social Problems. The article, titled, “Expectations and Realities: Education, the Discipline Gap, and the Experiences of Black Families Migrating to Small Cities,” is co-authored by Lawrence Torry Winn. They delivered a presented about this work at the National Council of Teachers of English Assembly for Research on Feb. 7 in New Orleans.

As the face of America becomes increasingly diverse, the number of children’s books by and about people of color has remained stubbornly stable over the past 25 years, according to annual data compiled by UW-Madison’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center. The most recent figures released Feb. 18, however, may contain a sliver of good news for those hoping that kids’ books will one day better reflect the population at large.

Since Gov. Scott Walker released his proposed 2015-17 biennial budget, many have asked if there are lessons we can learn from other states about the likely impact of the governor’s recommendation on the UW System. WISCAPE's Noel Radomski writes: “Based on a literature review, conversations with higher education scholars and system administrators, and an informative Wisconsin State Journal article by Dan Simmons, one state sticks out above all others: Virginia.”

UW-Madison’s Constance Steinkuehler and Kurt Squire will be presenting a C4 Public Lecture on campus on Wednesday, Feb. 18, titled, "Video Games and Popular Culture as a Sticky Medium for Public Engagement in Science.”

Four Wisconsin educators got the opportunity of a lifetime this fall when they received a behind-the-scenes tour of Finland’s education system. Greg Sonsalla, a sixth grade science teacher at the Glacial Drumlin Middle School in the Monona Grove School District, and Waunakee Middle School eighth grade science teacher Jessica North spent five days in September in Finland. They traveled to Finland with Dana Gnesdilow, who works in UW-Madison Professor Sadhana Puntambekar’s Interactive Learning and Design Lab.

A new study recently published by four UW-Madison education researchers, all graduate students in sociology and fellows in WCER’s Interdisciplinary Training Program in the Education Sciences, identifies processes for improving the engagement of low-income Latino families with their children’s elementary schools. The researchers studied data drawn from families in Phoenix, Arizona, and San Antonio, Texas, who participated in the FAST program -- an after-school program designed to strengthen relationships between families and schools.

In 2013-14 UW–Madison Professor Emeritus and WCER researcher Allen Phelps and colleagues looked closely at demographic factors and school factors associated with students’ success in dual-credit courses at Fox Valley Technical College and 20 large public high schools. Theirs was part of a larger study examining the factors affecting postsecondary student success at four Wisconsin technical college campuses.

Amanda Ochsner, a researcher at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery’s Games + Learning + Society group and Ph.D. candidate in the School of Education’s top-ranked Department of Curriculum and Instruction, is writing a dissertation about women and digital game design, and probing the reasons why so few women are game designers.

UW-Madison’s Delta Program in Research, Teaching and Learning finding success in helping prepare future and current college faculty on campus to become better teachers of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects. This initiative is funded by the Office of the Provost and administered by the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER) within the School of Education.

Young students in the Madison Metropolitan School District were part of a study assessing a new curriculum meant to promote social, emotional and academic skills, conducted by UW-Madison’s Center for Investigating Healthy Minds (CIHM) at the Waisman Center. Researchers found that kids who had participated in the curriculum earned higher marks in academic performance measures and showed greater improvements in areas that predict future success than kids who had not. The results were recently published in the journal Developmental Psychology.

UW-Madison's Alison Brooks and David Bell were recently awarded a grant from the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine (AMSSM) to analyze the potential problems associated with student-athletes at the high school level specializing in a single sport.

UW-Madison alumna Julie Stamm is the lead author of a new study out of the Boston University School of Medicine that points to a possible increased risk of cognitive impairment from playing youth football. Stamm is a Ph.D. candidate in anatomy and neurobiology, and is part of the research team at the Boston University Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy. She received her undergraduate degree from UW-Madison’s Athletic Training Program, which is housed in the Department of Kinesiology, in 2009.

In an effort to inform the public about Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to grant the UW System more freedoms and flexibilities from the state, while at the same time cutting $300 million from its budget, those associated with the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education are posting a series of articles to the WISCAPE blog.

The second edition of Bruce Wampold’s, “The Great Psychotherapy Debate: The Evidence for What Makes Psychotherapy Work,” has been updated and revised to expand the presentation of the Contextual Model, which is derived from a scientific understanding of how humans heal in a social context and explains findings from a vast array of psychotherapies studies.

An article by UW-Madison’s Erica Turner was recently published by the American Educational Research Journal. The paper is titled, “Districts’ Responses to Demographic Change: Making Sense of Race, Class and Immigration in Political and Organizational Context." Its abstract notes that that “many U.S. public school systems now face three large demographic shifts: rising poverty, the growing number of students from immigrant families, and increasing populations of students of color. Yet, we know little about how district policymakers react to these important changes.”

A public policy pre-conference forum at the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) conference brought together a group of performance funding scholars and practitioners, including the UW’s Nicholas Hillman, to examine the landscape of performance-based funding policies and to discuss future directions for this increasingly-popular policy instrument.

UW-Madison’s Maisha T. Winn is the author of an essay that appears in a new book titled, “Girls in Justice.” Winn is UW-Madison’s Susan J. Cellmer Chair in English Education, and is a professor of language and literacy with the top-ranked Department of Curriculum and Instruction. The section authored by Winn is titled, "Between 'Black girls rock' and a hard place," and it examines racial disparities in the punishment of black girls in the juvenile justice system.

Performance-based funding is falling short of its intended goals of raising student retention and degree completion rates at community colleges, according to a new research paper co-authored by UW-Madison's Nicholas Hillman. “Tying state financing to college ‘performance’ is expected to create an incentive for colleges to produce more degree recipients and retain students at higher rates. However, evidence from the Washington experiment suggests these results do not occur in systematic ways,” says Hillman